CATHERINE GOUGAR

Probably the Earliest Pioneer Resident of Ohio Who Has Descendants Living Upon the Original

Place of Settlement

BY FRANK WARNER, M. D., D. SC., COLUMBUS, OHIO.

On the farm of Alfred Immell, situated on the pike from Columbus to Chillicothe, some ten miles north of the latter city, lies buried Catherine Gougar. Her remains have lain here since 1801, when she died at the

age of sixty-nine years. She died within two years

of the establishment of Ohio as a State and within view of its first capital, Chillicothe; having lived under the shadow of Mount Logan from which Ohio has taken its great seal.

Mrs. Alfred Immell is a direct descendant of Catherine Gougar and lives upon the same farm where her great-great-grandmother lived when she was brought a captive here by the Indians in 1744.

As related in the inscription on the monument, after having returned to her old home in Pennsylvania, she married George Goodman; bore a son, John, and came back to Ohio in 1798; settling upon the same spot where she had been brought captive. Mrs. Immell was a Goodman before her marriage and is a direct descendant of the little girl, Catherine Gougar, who was but twelve years of age when she was brought here 178

years ago.

The following is the inscription on the monument:

IN MEMORY OF CATHERINE GOUGAR

Pioneer wife and mother, born in New Jersey in 1732. Captured by the Indians in 1744, in Berks County, Pa., and for five years held a captive at and near this place. Sold to FrenchCanadian Traders, she served in Canada for two years, finally gaining her freedom, she returned to her former home only to find her parents gone and herself homeless. She lived with friends. until 1756, when she married George Goodman who died in 1795. With her son John, came to Ohio in 1798 and, by a strange fortune, settled on this spot where she had been held a captive while with the Indians. Died in 1801, and lies here in the place chosen by herself and cleared by her own hands.

This monument is erected to her memory by her great grandchildren in 1915.

Hildreth, in Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, observes that the settlement of Ohio first commenced on the 7th of April, 1788, at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers; that the settlement was called Marietta in honor of the friend of their country, the Queen of France. He further observes in reference to the settlement: "This was directly athwart the Indian war path; for it was down the Muskingum and its tributary branches that the Wyandotts, the Shawnees, the Ottawas, and all the Indians of the North and Northwest, were accustomed to march, when from time to time, for almost half a century before, they made those dreadful incursions into western Virginia and western Pennsylvania, which spread desolation, and ruin, and despair, through all these regions."

It was on one of these incursions of the Indians, forty-four years before the earliest settlement of Ohio, 1788, that Catherine Gougar was captured, in 1744, and brought to the Ohio country. She was then only twelve years old and remained here captive five years, living with Indians near Chillicothe. What a wonderfully strange circumstance that she should have returned here later, in 1798, to make her home with her son as her escort and protector. Almost as interesting is the fact that the descendants of Catherine Gougar, who first came to Ohio thirty-two years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the war of the American Revolution, should be living and owning the land upon which this early pioneer first located, though captive, in the very dim light of the early morning of Ohio history. How her life was mingled with tragedy and romance!

An Ordinance for the government of the Territory Northwest of the Ohio River was passed by Congress July 13, 1787. Forty-three years before this, the subject of our sketch had lived here; and she returned eleven years after that. She lived under this territorial government for three years before her death which occurred in 1801, or one year before the adoption of the constitution of the State of Ohio. What wonderful civic history was in the making in Ohio during the closing years of her eventful life!

Catherine Gougar, after a residence of five years on the banks of the Scioto, near Chillicothe, was just leaving here with her new owners, the French Canadian Traders who had purchased her, and was on her road to Canada, where she was to make another enforced residence of two years, when Louis the Fifteenth of France was taking formal possession of a vast territory of which Ohio was a part, though a small part. This was in 1749. This formality consisted, says Hildreth, in his Pioneer History, published in 1849, of - "Erecting a wooden cross, near the mouth of a stream and burying a leaden plate at its foot on which was engraved a legend, setting forth the claim of Louis the Fifteenth to the country by the right of prior discovery, and by formal treaties with the European powers."

In 1763, fourteen years after Catherine, the girl now seventeen years of age, was taken from Ohio to Canada, the lands along the Ohio river as well as Canada, were surrendered to England after the terrible struggle of the French-Indian War which had begun in 1755.

When she again returned to Ohio, in 1798, she came to a land no longer owned by the French, as she had left it, nor to the English, who had possessed it for a

number of years during her absence; a new nation had been born; the United States was now the owner of this territory which was soon to become a statethe great state of Ohio, the soil of which her feet had trod so many, many years before. As Atwater observes, in A History of the State of Ohio, (1838, p. 110), “It was indeed a long and bloody war, in which Louis XIV, XV, lost Canada, and all the country watered by the Ohio river." It was fortunate for our heroine that she was neither in Ohio nor Canada during this bloody conflict which cost so many lives; the lives of Logan's family were lost at this time, and such a bloody conflict might well included our captive heroine when this story of her could not have been related.

The first substantial effort at the settlement of the Ohio river country was not made until 1748, four years after our captive child had been residing in Ohio. This was through the formation of the Ohio Land Company under the leadership of Thomas Lee, of Virginia, which had been granted a half million acres of land located principally on the south shore of the Ohio river between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers. The fruition of the settlement of Ohio under the stimulus of this company was not until the expedition which started for the Muskingum outlet to form the town of Marietta under the leadership of Rufus Putnam, in 1788. Just forty-four years before the first settlement of Ohio was formed, Catherine Gougar was a resident here.

Of these early captive settlers, history tells of two of great interest, Mary Harris and Mary Ingles. "Mary Ingles is often claimed," says Randall, in Randall and Ryan's History of Ohio, "as the first white woman in Ohio, but this is clearly erroneous." She was cap